About Mulapin

Mulapin Research Group is an independent research organization founded by Joshua McElwee in Fort Myers, Florida. It studies how law and governance adapt to emerging domains — commercial space, advanced computation, and the institutions that regulate both.

The group works from primary sources — statutes and treaties, regulations, federal dockets, and agency guidance — and publishes for public benefit. Its work takes the form of research reports, papers, and briefs, and of public comments filed in active rulemakings, written for the institutions and new entrants finding their footing where the rules are still being drafted.

The name comes from MUL.APIN, the Babylonian astronomical compendium compiled roughly three thousand years ago and preserved on a pair of clay tablets. It catalogued the constellations, tracked the paths of the sun, the moon, and the planets, and set out the calendar rules that kept the year in order — one of the first systematic attempts to write down the rules of a frontier. Its title is simply its first entry: “the Plough,” the constellation that opened the Babylonian year.

A note for the purists: in the original tongue, the first syllable would likely have sounded less like mull and more like a contented cow — something closer to MOOO-ah-pin. With due respect to three thousand years of tradition, the group has adopted the more standard English reading.